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Stephen Sondheim will have two productions on the boards in 2023-24 |
Thursday, March 16, 2023
B'way Update: Final Sondheim; Merrily Finds Theater; No More Room
Saturday, March 11, 2023
2023 Oscars Films and Quick Predix
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Everything Everywhere All at Once will probably be the big winner at tomorrow night's Oscars. Credit: A24 |
Saturday, March 4, 2023
Book Review: First Person Singular: Stories
Taken out of the Jackson Heights Library and read in a few days. I've read lots of Murakami and this eight-story collection was satisfying and bite-sized, yet so weird the stories linger long after you have finished them. As per the title all are in first person, some seem be spoken by the author himself. Most of the narrators are recalling enigmatic encounters in their past. There are ruminations on baseball and music (both jazz and classical), a meeting with a speaking monkey (who also appeared in Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman) who steals people's names. A dream meeting with Charlie Parker. I think I liked With the Beatles best where a man recalls the impact of the Beatles on his generation, the strange older brother of his girlfriend, and Percy Faith's theme from A Summer Place playing in the background. The stories don't always make sense, and they don't have to. Murakami doesn't rely on conventional plot, but creates a feeling and evocations based on situations, objects, meetings, etc.
Sunday, February 26, 2023
Book Review: Carrie and Me: A Mother-Daughter Love Story
Downloaded on my Kindle for about $10. A slim volume but obviously heartfelt. I finished it in a few hours. After viewing a YouTube clip from Carrie Hamilton's guest appearance with her mother on the short-lived Carol and Company, I was curious about this book. After beating a crushing drug habit in her teens, Carrie moved to a remote cabin in Colorado, toured as a musician and singer, and traveled to LA for acting gigs. She developed lung cancer and died at the tragically young age of 38. The first half of the book consists of Carol's reminiscences and email exchanges with her daughter as she takes a cross-country road trip to Memphis to visit Graceland while writing a story about a young woman making a similar journey. The second half of the book is that unfinished story, "Sunrise in Memphis." The story is sentimental and reads like a proposal for a TV-movie. The heroine Kate finds herself driving to Elvis' home in the company of a mysterious, super-polite cowboy. Along the way, they meet--briefly bump into would be more accurate--a covey of the usual colorful characters. There are flashbacks to the last night she can remember--clubbing with friends in Hollywood--and to a dream of a plane crash. After a few pages, you can guess where the plot is headed. Think "Highway to Heaven." It must have been painful for Burnett to work on this project, so I won't criticize any shortcomings. It's a sweet valentine to her departed child.
Friday, February 24, 2023
Book Review: The Critic's Daughter
Bought at Barnes and Noble: full price of $28. Priscilla Gilman's moving memoir of her relationship with her father, critic-essayist-teacher Richard Gilman, is incredibly detailed and specific in her memories of her dad's flaws and triumphs personally and professionally. The heart of the book is the bitter divorce between her parents, her dad the famously acerbic theater critic and her mom the powerful literary agent whose clients win Pulitzer Prizes and other awards like most people eat breakfast. Priscilla documents her painful role of acting as the "good, mature" daughter who holds it together while everyone else is falling apart. Richard Gilman emerges as a complicated, brilliant, but stubborn father and husband. What sticks with me are the little details--when he takes his daughters to lunches, the cash-strapped Gilman collects condiment packages. Here is a revered critic, feared by the likes of Tennessee Williams and David Merrick, hording ketchups and sugars. Gilman also recreates a world of literary New York that no longer exists. The internet has destroyed the traditional print media in which her father and mother thrived. She also gives us the harrowing final days of her dad's death by cancer as he is lovingly cared for by his third wife in Japan. A thorough, meticulous accounting of a daughter's love. We are friends with Priscilla's half-brother Nick and I feel I know him and his family better now.
Reconstructing the Carol Burnett Show: Part 37: Carol Channing, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, and Others
Sept. 30, 1968: Carol Channing
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Carol and Carol |
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
B'way Update: Laurie Metcalf to Star in Grey House
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Laurie Metcalf |
Thursday, February 16, 2023
B'way Update: The Cottage, Jerry Mitchell Is Busy, Betty Boop, La La, etc.
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Eric McCormack will return to Broadway this summer in The Cottage. |
Saturday, February 11, 2023
Book Review: Olive, Again
Taken out of the Jackson Heights library. After reading Elizabeth Strout's Lucy by the Sea, where Olive is briefly mentioned as living in a retirement community, I took out Strout's sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge and enjoyed it. The writing style is very different from the Lucy book which is almost Hemingway-esque in its spareness. The third-person narrative is from Olive's point of view, at least in the chapters where she is the main character. In several others, she appears only tangentially. The structure is a collection of interrelated short stories of the residents of the tiny coastal town of Crosby, Maine, some of them have been the protagonists of other Strout novels such as The Burgess Boys and Isabelle and Amy (perhaps I will get to those books later). Everyone in town has secrets and Strout unsparingly shares them and their keepers' humanity and vulnerability. A teenage girl has a bizarre but tender relationship with her teacher's husband. A warring elderly couple attempts to understand their daughter's work as a dominatrix. The brutally honest, undiplomatic Olive examines her life and attempts to mellow as she negotiates relationships with her second husband, her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren, and finally with her fellow residents in the retirement complex. Strout expertly depicts the indignities of aging, including incontinence. All the everyday details are here, both unpleasant and endearing.
Sunday, February 5, 2023
Disappearing Act
Observations of a vanishing culture:
The DVD section at the Union Square Barnes and Noble is now only a few shelves. It used to be a whole room.
When people go to the movie theaters, there are usually only a few attendees in the audience. At the last film I saw in a theater, Tar, we were among a handful in the seats. Cinema chains are shutting down including the Cinepolis on 23rd street and the Regal Union Square.
On the subway, I was the only one reading an actual book. Everyone else was staring into their phones.
No one sells photo albums anymore. No one writes checks. I can't listen to CDs in my car anymore because there is no CD player. I prefer CDs to streaming music because I have more control.
It happens to me every time. I want to sit down somewhere public to read while I kill time before an appointment, but I can never find a seat and I wind up wandering through the B&N or the Strand for hours.
When visiting my mother, I noticed that the Philadelphia Inquirer no longer runs a grid of TV listings.
Saturday, February 4, 2023
Reconstructing the Carol Burnett Show, Part 36: Carol and Company
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Carol and Company: Carol surrounded by regular cast members (l. to r.) Jeremy Piven, Anita Barone, Terry Kiser, Meagan Fay, and Richard Kind. Peter Krause later replaced Jeremy Piven. |
Wednesday, February 1, 2023
B'way Update: Leslie Odom, Jr. to Star in Purlie Victorious
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Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee in Purlie Victorious |
Sunday, January 29, 2023
Book Review: Assassination Vacation
Found in one of those little library boxes outside a church in our neighborhood. For free. I've been meaning to read this for a while because I love history and this looked like an interesting read. Sarah Vowell takes us on a funny, quirky road trip down American history lane. With her sister and macabre-obsessed toddler nephew, Vowell visits various locations associated with the assassinations of three presidents--Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley. Along the way, she offers views on the current state of our nation, drawing parallels between the McKinley and Bush administrations (the book was written during the Iraq war). There are also fascinating recreations of each shocking moment of violence, the bizarre coincidence that Robert Lincoln, Abe's eldest, was present for all three killings, and the state of our union during the various time periods. Enjoyable and sharp.
Tuesday, January 24, 2023
B'way Update: Making 'Room' and Changes to the OCC Awards
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Adrienne Warren |
Sunday, January 22, 2023
Reconstructing the Carol Burnett Show, Part 35: Down the Helen Reddy Wormhole
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Carol with Helen Reddy |
Friday, January 20, 2023
Off-B'way Update: Days of Wine and Roses Musical
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Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses |
Monday, January 16, 2023
Reconstructing the Carol Burnett Show: Part 34: Carol's 1991 Comeback
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Carol with Martin Short on her short-lived 1991 variety series |
Thursday, January 12, 2023
B'way Update: Here Lies Love and Hamlet
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Jose Llana and Ruthie Ann Miles in the Off-Broadway production of Here Lies Love. |
Here Lies Love, featuring a sung-through score by pop icons David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, will begin previews at the Broadway Theater on June 17 and open on July 20. The theater will be reconfigured into a dance floor for the show's environmental design. The original production opened at the Public Theater in 2013 and won five Lucille Lortel Awards and three Drama Desk Awards. The show has had subsequent stagings in London and Seattle. Original director Alex Timbers (Tony winner for Moulin Rouge) returns to the production.
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
Broadway Update: Parade Revival with Ben Platt
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Micaela Diamond and Ben Platt in Parade which will transfer to Broadway after its NYCC run. Credit: Joan Marcus |
Parade, directed by Michael Arden (Once on This Island, Deaf West's revival of Spring Awakening) will begin previews on Feb. 21 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater and open on March 16 for a limited run until Aug. 6.
Sunday, January 8, 2023
Lionel Barrymore Imitations in Cartoons
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Lionel Barrymore in It's a Wonderful Life |
Book Review: Lucy by the Sea
One of my resolutions of 2023 is to post my reviews of the books I read, no matter how short. I have been doing this on the website Goodreads.com. I did copy over some reviews occasionally in previous years, but I want to start keeping a record of my reading here on the blog. Also to record where I got the book as a journal of my connections with the book world.
Bought at Barnes and Noble for $28 with a few dollars left on a gift card from last year. I really enjoyed reading Strout's fourth novel about Lucy Barton, presumably an autobiographical figure, a novelist dealing with aging, her ex-husband, her two grown-up daughters, and the trauma of growing up within a dysfunctional, poverty-stricken household in a garage rather than a house. (Previous works are My Name Is Lucy Barton, Anything Is Possible, Oh, William. The first one was made into a solo play starring Laura Linney on Broadway.) In this version, Lucy chronicles her experiences of the COVID pandemic. Her ex-husband William, a scientist, brings her to stay in a remote house in rural Maine to avoid the mass infections in NYC. As the lockdown drags on, William and Lucy reconnect, her daughters encounter their own crises, and she makes friends with characters who also appear in Strout's Olive Kittredge novels (Pulitzer Prize, made into an HBO mini-series with Frances MacDormand). Spare, incisive prose cuts to the heart of her characters. Lucy deals with Trump supporters and the BLM movement with compassion. No one is a hero or villain, just people trying to get along.Sunday, January 1, 2023
Reconstructing the Carol Burnett Show: Part 33
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Carol as Trilby and Jack Palance as Svengali |
Channel 21 continues to air full-hour reruns of Carol's show, but this is one of the rare ones that heretofore has not surfaced in its entirety. I discovered it several weeks ago and DVRed it. I had seen the MeTV edited versions plus YouTube clips of Carol's numbers with Liza. Previously unviewed material includes a typically lame Carol-and-Sis sketch where Carol and Roger entertain Crissy's date--a whacked-out hippie. But it turns out he's not her date, just a crazy guy looking for a hand-out, and then an even weirder guy in black leather motorcycle gear show up as Crissy's real date. Later Carol plays a saloon entertainer in the Wild West who destroys a bar with her Ethel Merman-like vocals. Then she has a solo warbling a slow version of "Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nelly."